Living in a small town is a lot like being part of a big family. We often rely on one another for things both little and big -- from a hand with cleaning the chimney to serving in public office. While much of the news may be about running our country, we are more concerned with running our town.
The locally owned weekly, the Chilkat Valley News, was 16 pages last week -- it is usually 12. Two were devoted to letters and there were three thank-you notes, but the rest were about the Borough Assembly election. A former state assistant attorney general is being challenged by a logger, and a retired teacher is challenging a heavy equipment operator. A former mayor, a Tlingit woman, is running against the current mayor, an artist. I know and like them all, but will vote for the ones that I think will do the best job. I'm also not sure what political party any of them belong to, although I suspect they are mostly undeclared or independent.
I do know if you walked into the bakery and asked the coffee crowd who's voting red and who's voting blue, more than a few would say "none of your business," which a pollster would log as undecided. Really, do you think anyone in the country is undecided? It's just like our sales tax question. I'm pretty sure we all know how we are going to vote, but only a few pro and con letter writers are shouting about it.
The question asks if we should eliminate the sales tax on fuel. Here in Haines, we have a 5½ percent sales tax on everything. The argument for not taxing fuel is that the price is already too high. The argument for keeping the tax is that it is worth about $400,000 a year and goes a long way toward supporting our school, library, and pool, as well as the ambulance service and snow plowing. Also, it comes mostly from summer gas station sales to tour bus operators or RVs driving north. I think, and hope, we'll keep the tax.
In other news, there are bears on the beach, bears on Main Street, and bears in my backyard. One has even figured out how to open chest freezers, the kind that are on porches here. He ripped the lid right off Don and Becky Nash's. Perhaps the same one tore into another freezer a few nights later. Its owner sleeps in the nude and doesn't want that in the paper. I heard that he climbed onto the roof outside his bedroom with a rifle, yelling at the bear. The roof was slick and he slid into the yard. Luckily he had a soft landing, and luckily the bad bear was frightened by the bellowing bare man.
Some news has more unhappy endings. The police found almost all of the 11 kegs stolen from the Haines Brewery, but the new chief told the paper what a lot of us have been thinking for some time, that the people that do most of vandalism in Haines are not "misguided youth. ... What we have here are criminals." That should give us plenty to talk about this winter. How do we hold each other's children accountable and still live together?
The best news is that we finally got the OK from the state to put a crosswalk and speed limit signs in front of the school. It's been an ongoing battle for decades. The state had argued that because the stretch of road by the school is technically a highway, we couldn't paint a crosswalk on it.
There are a few signs up for state office seekers, and Ted Stevens still has supporters, but the Chilkat Valley News hasn't covered his trial or the national election. The editor, my friend Tom, told a caller who wanted him to write about Sarah Palin that he only covers statewide or national politicians when they come here, if they're from here, or if they're deciding issues or working on projects based here. When the woman argued that Sarah was the biggest story since George Washington, he said he missed that one, too. Later he said, "I wished I'd said, 'We're a newspaper. We're not People magazine.' " He didn't mention the governor's vetoes. But using his criteria for coverage, the only thing he could report about Sarah is that she vetoed funding for the Chilkoot Lake campground bear monitor, asbestos removal, a sewer main, repairs for the pool, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and the Boy Scout camp.
I'm not going to guess on the national election, but I think that Tip O'Neill was right. When it comes to small-town Alaska, all politics are local, and the news is about what matters most to us.
Heather Lende lives in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at heatherlende@adn.com.
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